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Westerners Safe, Say Pakistan Fighters

At the end of a rutted dirt road and through a metal gate lies the rundown local lair of an Islamic fundamentalist group of holy warriors that the State Department has classified as a terrorist outfit.

From this grubby stucco house, young bearded men say they have ventured into Kashmir to battle Indian rule of part of that majority-Muslim territory.

They boast that their volunteers have taken part in bold and violent raids on Indian outposts in Kashmir. The raids are contributing to the increasingly poisonous relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed.

''For 40 days' military training and three months of guerrilla training, contact Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, Peshawar,'' said a banner in Urdu that recently fluttered above a table loaded with the group's literature on a street here.

But American officials, citing intelligence reports, charge that Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, or the Fighters Movement, does more than wage jihad, or holy war, against India. They say it was behind the kidnapping of Western tourists -- and the beheading of one -- in 1995 as well as the recent hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane.

American diplomats have been urging the military government that took control of Pakistan in a coup on Oct. 12 to crack down on the group. Pressure intensified after the hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane demanded and won the release on Dec. 31 of a Muslim cleric who had been one of the group's spiritual leaders.

The cleric, Maulana Masood Azhar, returned to Pakistan after he was freed from an Indian jail and immediately began speaking out against India and the United States.

After Mr. Azhar appeared at rallies for several weeks surrounded by heavily armed men, he was arrested by the Pakistani government. But the government has taken no action against Harakat itself, saying it has no evidence of the group's involvement in terrorist acts.

''We were concerned when this fellow, Masood Azhar, made wild statements calling for the destruction of India and the United States, but this is not the policy of a group,'' said Pakistan's foreign minister, Abdul Sattar. ''We don't have enough proof to ban this group.''

Western diplomats in Islamabad say they doubt that a lack of evidence is what is deterring Pakistan's military rulers from clamping down. Rather, the diplomats assert, the government's reluctance stems from the fact that these so-called jihad groups are the cat's paw that the Pakistani military finances and uses to bleed India in Kashmir.

''They are instruments of Pakistan's foreign policy,'' said one Western diplomat. ''They are the cards Pakistan brings to the table with India. Without them the Pakistanis have no leverage. So they see supporting these organizations as indispensable to the most important foreign policy issue in Pakistan.''

Whether unable or unwilling to ban Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, Pakistan's military rulers have apparently instructed those true believers to cool their public statements and keep their talk of holy war directed at India -- not the United States.

The young men at the Harakat ul-Mujahedeen headquarters here in Peshawar hewed carefully to the group's line of thinking, which echoes that of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler: groups waging holy war are acceptable, but terrorism is not.

The chief of the Mardan district, which borders Peshawar here in North-West Frontier Province, who goes by the single name Abdullah, insisted that Mr. Azhar was no longer a member of the group and that the group had no interest in a jihad against the United States, only against India.

''We have no fight with Westerners,'' he said. ''There are so many of them wandering around Pakistan. We never kidnap or kill them. Our fight is with India.''

Abdullah, 28, a farmer's son, said his beliefs would not allow him to speak directly to a female reporter, so the interview was conducted through a male translator.

The walls of the bedroom where the interview took place were illuminated by a single bare fluorescent bulb and decked with posters of assault rifles and pointy-nosed fighter jets, as well as a cracked, chipped full-length mirror that the young militants presumably use to check the tilt of their woolen caps.

The translator sat in the doorway, and Abdullah sat on a veranda just outside the room, with the door pulled so he was out of sight.

He distanced the group from Mr. Azhar and deferred to the government on the question of why the cleric had been arrested. He denied that the group received any material or operational support from Inter-Services Intelligence, an arm of the military.

''We don't even know what I.S.I. stands for,'' he said.

And he said he was mystified as to why the Americans considered Harakat ul-Mujahedeen a terrorist group.

''We sometimes wonder why the United States has taken us as their enemy,'' he said. ''We have no reach to do anything in the United States. I see no reason why it should fear us.''